The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Disconnecting the Dots: Blurring the Lines - Patrick Dunleavy

by Patrick Dunleavy

When the current administration removes the words "radical Islamic terrorism" from the equation, it is more than a semantic faux pas.
It is an intentional erasure of one of the dots necessary to see
clearly the threat facing the United States.

In
my childhood, one of the fun games in the daily newspaper was a
"connecting the dots" puzzle. A simple system of drawing a line from one
numbered dot to the other produced a picture any child could see. Every
now and then a typo would occur in the printing of the paper and the
result was an unsolvable puzzle with a blurred image. The newspaper
would issue an apology to its readers and that was that. A harmless
mistake in an innocent game.

The same solution does not hold true in more serious fields.

In the war on terrorism, substituting hard facts with esoteric
rhetoric blurs the picture and creates confusion. The latest example of
this situation, coming on the heels of the terrorist attack in Orlando,
is the Department of Homeland Security's interim report on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Subcommittee released this month.

This was not a wartime strategy report. On the contrary, this was the
administration's latest initiative to move further away from the war on
terrorism and blur the picture as to who the enemy really is.

The subcommittee was formed as part of the DHS's Homeland Security
Advisory Council ("HSAC") last November. It was described by the
department as "an incubator of ideas." It defines CVE as the actions
taken to counter efforts by extremists to radicalize, recruit, or
mobilize followers to violence. Who is a violent extremist you ask?
According to the report, it is an individual who supports or commits
ideologically-motivated violence to further political goals. And what
type of weapons would one use in this fight? The committee recommends
using "soft power tools." Soft power is a conceptual idea that persuasive words are more important than the use of force in a time of war.

This formation of the subcommittee and its objectives coincided with
the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 130 and injured more than 350
men women and children. The sophistication of the Paris attacks and the
subsequent Brussels attacks led authorities to conclude that the
terrorists had received prior combat training. Some had returned to
Europe after fighting with ISIS in Syria.

One month after the subcommittee was formed, another terrorist attack
occurred in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 people dead and 22
injured. The attack was carried out by a husband and wife jihadi team,
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik.

In Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, Omar Mateen, having pledged bayat,
or allegiance, to ISIS, opened fire on the crowd killing 49 people and
wounding 53 others. His goal was not political. It was to rid the world
of infidels.

In the original 9/11 Commission report, the committee clearly identified the enemy:
It "is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs
the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more
specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism..."

And lest we think that pronouncement has changed in the 15 years since 9/11, we should look at the supplemental report issued by the commission 10 years later.
In it, the members informed us that the threat of Islamic terrorism had
not been defeated but had grown stronger, and had evolved in
methodology, tactics and leadership.

When the current administration removes the words "radical Islamic terrorism" from the equation, it is more than a semantic faux pas.
It is an intentional erasure of one of the dots necessary to see
clearly the threat facing the United States. It identifies who has
declared war on us.

Groups like al-Qaida, al-Shabaab, and ISIS are not looking to attract students to some philosophy or political science class.

They are soldiers, combat-hardened jihadists, sadistic killers. They
are using every tool available to them to recruit more – social media,
the internet, violent videos, fiery sermons. Soft power means nothing to
them. They respond only to the sword.

When the president uses terms
like "the full resources of the federal government" and "spare no
effort" in responding to the latest terrorist attack by an Islamist,
what exactly does it mean? To the average American it sounds like more
rhetoric from the "incubator of ideas."

This administration and Congress must give the FBI and local law enforcement the necessary resources,
including the additional manpower and equipment necessary to face the
current challenge of investigating numerous leads on ISIS sympathizers
within our borders. And they must restore to our intelligence agencies
the ability to collect and analyze the data necessary to track Islamic
terrorist organization like ISIS.In a time of war we need decisive action, not soft power tools.

IPT Senior Fellow Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector
General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/5452/disconnecting-the-dots-blurring-the-lines Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.